Associate Professor

Education

MS, Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1988

BS, Computer Science, Pennsylvania State University, 1985

Biography

Lance’s background is in computational modeling of the human visual system, where he did foundational work on the phenomenon of completion of visible surfaces and illusory contours. More recently, he has returned to his computer science roots, and is studying new models of computation, inspired by chemistry, which are parallel, distributed, asynchronous and spatial. He is deeply interested in self-replicating systems and evolutionary computation, with the goal of better understanding the origin of life, its evolution into more complex forms, and the nature of intelligence in man and machine.